NaNo Retrospective

After thirty days of furious writing and literary abandon, NaNoWriMo 2012 is over.

Thank god.

My final word count was 271,172 words, which is more than I thought that I would get going into the month, but less than some of my more lofty goals. That’s fine, though; those goals were there to push me, and push me they did.

I finished one novel, start to finish, that is rather rough but probably has a workable first draft. I started another, and got around 60k on it. It’s about halfway through, maybe, so one of my goals for this month is to finish it, if possible. I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for it, but I hope to.

My plan to break up November by weeks and have a focus on individual weeks rather than the entire month was a good idea, though. I only had well-defined goals and rewards for the first three weeks. but I met all of them smashingly. After that, I kind of petered out, which means that if I’m going to push myself next year, I need to have more and better rewards. It seems to work for me, combined with the weekly focus.

My region also did really well. Of 79 people that had at least one word, 29 won, which I think is just great, especially for an elsewhere region. We also donated as much as the physical region that I am in (once I added mine, which isn’t showing up on the site), and since they are twice our size, I am very happy of that. We were 53rd overall in average word count, which is excellent.

So now it’s the post-November hiatus, but I won’t be on it long. I’ve got works to finish, and 2-3 web projects that are in need of attention. I’ll be posting more about them coming up, as well as my plans for next year (spoiler alert: it’s editing).